Terrorist Hostage-Taking in Civil War

Between 1975 and 2018, 30% of rebel organizations active in civil wars kidnapped hostages. There is also significant variation in attacks across time and space, within and across civil wars. My project seeks to explain this variation and examines the logic, lethality, and efficacy of its usage in civil war. It is divided into three distinct papers, which answer the following questions: (1) Why do some rebel organizations resort to kidnapping in civil war while others do not? What explains variation in kidnapping over space and time? (2) Why and when do organizations kill hostages? (3) Why and when do governments negotiate with terrorist organizations for the release of hostage victims? The final paper will be the main focus during this research award. With original event-level data on hostage negotiations in the Philippines from 1975 to 2018, I will perform a quantitative analysis across two stages. First, I will consider the likelihood of negotiations in specific cases with a causal exact matching technique. Next, I will investigate the time it takes to enter negotiations in a survival model framework.

Faculty Supervisor:

Lee Seymour

Student:

Partner:

University of Essex

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Public Service, Policy, and Governance; Other

University:

Université de Montréal

Program: